VentureBeat Launches — Welcome to VentureBeat -the successor to SiliconBeat! … Dear friends, — On Friday, I will serve my last day at the San Jose Mercury News and will no longer be blogging at SiliconBeat. VentureBeat has become my sole occupation and focus.

SiliconBeat to retire...VentureBeat has launched! — Folks, we've made some changes here at SiliconBeat. — Matt is going independent and will carry on the blogging at his new site, VentureBeat. You can see his first post here. — Mike, who had stepped back anyway from blogging actively …

Google Sued for AdSense Fraud — A would-be AdSense customer is suing Google for $250,000 because it took her 100 hours to place and review AdSense advertisements on her Web site, which Google subsequently removed, Google Watch has learned. — In a 25-page complaint filed earlier this week …

Cell phones won't keep your secrets — WASHINGTON (AP) — The married man's girlfriend sent a text message to his cell phone: His wife was getting suspicious. Perhaps they should cool it for a few days. — "So," she wrote, "I'll talk to u next week." — "You want a break from me?

Windows Live OneCare Family Safety beta now available! — Following the recent Windows Live OneCare Family Safety Invites being sent out to Windows Live Butterflies and the appearing of Windows Live OneCare Family Safety on Connect we thought that this Beta would be resticted to only those who had been approved to use it.

Man From Google Joins Apple's Board — When Eric E. Schmidt, Google's chief executive, was named to Apple Computer's board this week, it did more than signal a potential alliance between powerful companies. It touched off a wave of speculation about the motives of the man behind the move: Apple's co-founder, Steven P. Jobs.

Social software in perspective — Is social software a phenomenon or a passing fancy? The reality seems to lie somewhere in between, though considerably closer to fancy than phenomenon. "Social software," writes Phil Edwards today, "looks like very big news indeed from some perspectives …

Wireless Piggybackers Put on Notice — We've all done it: You're using your laptop in a location without hotspot access. You want onto the Internet, so you start scanning for open wireless LANs. You find one and, regardless of who owns it, you piggyback a ride onto the Web.

Handling noindex meta tags — Okay, here's a question. I did the search [congoo] recently and didn't get the home page of Congoo-why not? If you view the source of http://www.congoo.com/, it turns out that they have a noindex meta tag: — <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" />

The Washington Post, Social Media and Audience-Building — The Washington Post (or, properly, Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive) is one news outlet that gets social media: they seem to truly understand the the benefits that come from being a part of the broader internet conversation …

21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic — A considerable portion of my consulting time has recently revolved around the optmization of corporate blogs (or the addition of blogs to revamped sites). As usual, I find a pattern emerging in the strategies that need attention and the pitfalls that must be avoided.

Tech Support With Thomas Hawk — Ok, I've been thinking about doing a post like this for a while. This is going to be the post where I bitch about technology not working right. Except that this is going to be a living breathing post that frequently jumps to the top of my blog.

Flickr #1 Photography Site in UK — Flickr has taken the #1 spot in our Photography category and it seems to be down to good SEO (search engine optimisation) for soft porn searches. I'll admit it was a bit of a surprise last week when I looked at our Photography category and noticed that Flickr had moved into the #1 spot.

Search with a :-) — For a long time people have wanted the ability to search for terms and phrases on the web using non-letter (A-Z) characters. Put another way, searching using non-alphanumeric characters. — Well the time has come here at Ask.com and we've started to roll-out some what we hope are useful and practical examples.

Announcing Tesseract OCR — We wanted to let you all know that a few months ago we quietly released - or actually re-released - an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine into open source. You might wonder why Google is interested in OCR? In a nutshell, we are all about making information available …